Hugo Hamilton - The Speckled People - A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

It was a place where you could live on your imagination, my mother said, a place where everything was simple and you didn’t need possessions, not like some of her sisters in Germany who had to own more and more things all the time, until they could only talk about what they didn’t have and what they still wanted. It was a place full of things you could not pay for with money, a place where you could be rich with nothing but silence and landscape. All you needed was sandwiches and milk and the wind at your back, she said, and my father repeated the same thing in Irish, only the other way round, with your backside to the wind.

‘ Tóin in aghaidh na gaoithe ,’ he said.

So we laughed with our backsides to the wind and nobody ever thought of going home again. When it rained we got out our macs and sheltered behind the stone walls. The best shelter of all we learned from the sheep, when we were so far away from any house or any walls and the rain came so quickly that we just copied them and crouched down behind the rocks. Sometimes we found shelter in a doorway and stood watching the rain coming down at an angle. There was nothing to say and I saw my father going into a dream as he stared out into the rain without a word. My mother, too. All of us dreaming and sheltering from the words, speaking no language at all, just listening to the voice of the rain falling and the sound of water gurgling between the stones somewhere behind the barn. Then afterwards you could see the steam rising on the road when the sun came out again as bright as ever and the water continued to whisper along the roadside like the only language allowed.

One day my father met a man at the harbour whose name was De Bhaldraithe, and he had invented a dictionary of English words in Irish. It was a great book, my father said, as good as the book about people talking in the graveyard, because now at last everybody could learn Irish again. And that night they were invited over to a house where people gathered around to drink whiskey and sing songs. My father told lots of stories in Irish and my mother had to sing a song in German. The man who made the dictionary knew some German, too, so he was able to speak a few words to her, because nobody could speak any English.

And after all the singing and talking, there was a discussion about the state of the Irish language and everyone agreed it was still alive, more alive than ever before. They said people were putting the Irish language in a coffin and bringing it to the graveyard, but they didn’t realise that people can still talk in the grave. One man said Irish speakers in Ireland were being treated like people from a foreign country, from another planet. But as long as there were people like De Bhaldraithe and my father who made their own children speak it, the language would never die out. They drank whiskey and smoked pipes and passed around plates of ham sandwiches. It was a great night because nobody was laughing at the Irish language, except one woman who disagreed and said nobody could live on their imagination for ever. It was no use being poor, the woman suddenly said, and everyone in the house went so quiet that you could hear the turf hissing in the fire and somebody’s stomach murmuring. The woman said she was sick to death of seeing people coming down from Dublin for their holidays and all they wanted was the people in Connemara to stay living in thatched cottages with no toilets inside. What was the use in speaking Irish if you couldn’t put food on the table? But then my father made a speech in Irish that made everybody hold their glasses up in the air to him. He said he could see the woman’s point of view and it was no fun to be poor, but that’s why people in Dublin were busy working hard and making a sacrifice, too, so that Ireland could live on its own inventions and its own imagination. And in the end, he turned the argument around to say that toilets inside the house and food on the table were no good if you lost the language. Your stomach could be full but your heart would be empty.

They came home along the road in the dark when all the lights in the houses were already gone out. My mother says you could not even see your own shoes it was so dark. And one time, they stopped and whispered to each other because there was somebody standing right in front of them on the road just breathing and staring at them and not letting them pass by, but it was only a donkey that suddenly got an even bigger fright himself and ran off.

It was the best night of all, my mother said, except that in the middle of the night something funny happened. My father had to get up and go to the leithreas outside. The toilets in Connemara were all outside in a small wooden house with lots of flies and a bad smell of newspapers that always made me want to get sick. Inside there was a big box with a wooden lid and a hole in it. Underneath there was a bucket that Fear an tí sometimes brought to a field nearby where he could empty it out and bury it all underneath the soil. That night my father had to feel his way along the walls to go out the back door into the darkness. He found the leithreas and locked the door shut behind him. But then, as he turned around, there was no wooden board and he fell right down with his backside in the bucket.

At first everything was silent. It was dark all around and everybody in Connemara was asleep. My father couldn’t lift himself out. He was stuck in the bucket with his legs hanging out over the wooden box and his pyjamas around his ankles. He had his shoes on, but no socks, and his laces were undone. He thought he would be stuck like that for ever, so he started calling for help in Irish. Nobody came and all he could do was to keep shouting and banging on the side of the shed, until there was so much noise, they said the dogs were barking as far away as Casla. Everybody in the house woke up and Fear an tí went down at last to rescue my father from the leithreas. He first had to break down the door to get in. Then he had to put his arms around my father to lift him out and get the bucket off his backside and tell everybody, even the neighbours across the road, to go back to bed, it was nothing at all. He offered him a cigarette and a pipe and some whiskey, but my father just said he was going back to bed and after a long time the dogs stopped barking and everything was quiet again.

In the morning we could see the door of the leithreas lying on its side and the lock broken. Nobody said a word about what happened. Maybe Fear an tí was afraid that my father had hurt himself and wasn’t saying anything. Maybe Bean an tí was even more embarrassed, because if they all spoke English and had a proper toilet inside the house, it would never have happened. Maria kept saying that she was never going to the toilet again as long as she lived. She was holding her knees together and we started pretending that we were falling into the leithreas all the time. Going down the stairs or walking around the house, Franz just suddenly said ‘Oh’ and fell down into an invisible toilet. We did it again and again and kept laughing.

Even at breakfast around the table, it was hard not to think about the leithreas . It was Sunday and my father came down all ready for Mass in his best suit. Nobody said a word. Franz was trying not to laugh and had a very cross face with his mouth closed right. We knew my father couldn’t be really angry because all the people in the house would be watching him. Every time I looked at Franz I couldn’t stop myself from making a snort with my nose, until my father looked at me with hard eyes and my mother told us it was not nice to laugh at people’s misfortune.

‘It’s not fair,’ she said. ‘Because your father made such a good speech last night … and then he fell into the toilet.’